The Good Out Of This Bad Recession

Ed Glaeser has an unfortunately timed post arguing that recent city shrinkage is a sign that he was right in an earlier post that cities should spend more resources on ways of giving urban dwellers the chance to move out of the city than on trying to improve the city because it’s a hopeless task.

Too bad for Glaeser  that Conor Dougherty of The Wall Street Journal just reported that some cities that had been shrinking are actually growing thanks to the housing crisis. Because they can’t sell their homes at a reasonable price people are stuck in the cities. Dougherty cites a family in the magnificent city of Chicago:

In Chicago, Matthew Sessa and his wife sold their townhouse and decided against buying a four-bedroom house in the suburbs. They bought a three-bedroom in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood instead, with a yard not much bigger than their garage.

“What we ended up getting in the city was just as nice, and the neighborhood that we moved into also has a very good elementary and junior high,” said Mr. Sessa, a commercial banker who is 37 years old and has a baby due any day.

Not everyone is like the Sessas. There are plenty of families who don’t have the human capital to find a job in the city but that may not decide their fate forever. But this is actually good news. More people who can’t “escape” from the city results in denser communities which produces job opportunities. People living close together will need all kinds of things like food, daycare, cleaning services, law firms, entertainment, arts, transportation, etc. Those needs create jobs which the unemployed can help fill. And high density communities improve cities because the people living there don’t want to live in a dump and if they have money to spend, improvement is practically imminent.

So for the moment, there’s a lot to dislike about the economy but keeping people from moving out into high sprawl, low density communities is a pretty good thing actually.